Thank you, comic internet! Every so often I come across a piece that manages to define for me something that I've had a feeling about for a while but never put into words, and today that piece was Comics Economics at Are You Feelin Big Mike.

Really, this thing gives me a pretty good idea of why I grew up (and still remain, for the most part) primarily a fan of Marvel rather than DC. (Well, one of the reasons. Love is complicated. :))

Marvel has spent decades creating little sub-markets within Earth 616 so that readers can read X-Men or Spidey or Fantastic Four and ignore most of the other books most of the time. DC doesn't let us get away with that.

That seems to be true. When I wanted to start getting into DC comics a couple of years ago, I had to ask for directions. I started out with old JLA trade paperbacks, then branched off into Green Lantern from there. After that, I picked up things as I saw them recommended, for the most part (Birds of Prey, All-New Atom, both of which kindasorta standalone, come to think of it, or at least are readable on their own). And I'm okay with checking Wikipedia to find out what I don't know, and I sort of like all the old-DC-universe details, so really, I'm cool. But I can see where it could be daunting to a totally new reader.

But yeah, as a kid the only DC I read was Legion of Superheroes, and that was pretty much the only DC book that stood alone at the time (most of the time).

On the whole, with my Marvel comics, I don't have to keep looking at Wikipedia to find out what's what. Heck, I've been reading New Avengers since it began and I've never looked up Echo, and I still have no idea who she is outside of the NA context...